My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 19 and in doing so remind the House that I am co-president of London Councils. It is on behalf of London that I shall speak this evening.
Clause 44 changes the penalties on a national basis for waste collection. It amends provisions in the Environmental Protection Act 1990 on waste collection and waste receptacles. It changes the system from one which was subject to a fixed penalty notice regime—that is, a system based on the criminal law—to one based on the civil processes of a penalty charge notice system. This change seems wholly proportionate and sensible, and I have no disagreement with it.
However, to make this a national system, two provisions have had to be put in the legislation to bring London into the whole pot; namely Clause 44(6) and Schedule 12. Both of those have had to be inserted into this part of the legislation to ensure that it is a national scheme. The reason is that London is already running such a scheme, based on the amended Environmental Protection Act and under the London Local Authorities Act 2007.
This system has been running perfectly happily. It is a decriminalised penalty notice system based on the normal penalty notice way of doing things. It has an appeals system. It is managed by a joint committee of London Councils. It has been the forerunner of what the Government are now trying to do. The system is now recognised by everybody who lives in London.
I do not know whether people who are not involved in local authorities realise that it is not always easy either to identify somebody who is causing an infringement of the law or to make sure that they cough up when they are charged or recognised as having done so. As the system has been running perfectly successfully, London wants to stay that way.
My first reason for not wanting to see London included in the processes set out in the Bill, therefore, is that its system has been running perfectly well. The second is the bureaucracy that surrounds the Government’s proposals. There are four pages of legislation to tell enforcement officers how to issue a penalty charge notice. This is meant to be a Deregulation Bill, not a “pile it on high” Bill. With a penalty charge notice—as we all know, because we all get them from time—you receive it, you sigh deeply, you think about throwing it in the bin but, largely, you pay it because it tells you that if you pay up in two weeks you can do it more cheaply than if you wait for four weeks. If you feel really brassed off about it, you appeal. The process is neither very long nor very complicated, but there are four pages of legislation to introduce this new national system.
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Before issuing the notice, the enforcement officer, who has nothing else to do with his time, will have to write a note to the intended to say that he is intended, or to warn him that he is going to, perhaps, issue a penalty charge notice. Then the person who is going to receive it has a right of appeal against the fact that it is going to come. Then, the officer has to issue a notice of an intent to issue the penalty charge notice, so in my calculation, we are now about eight weeks down the line. He then can have the penalty charge notice and he can put that; but the offender has the right of appeal to that as well. It is—in very few words—Byzantine. What system or local authority would want to get caught up in having to provide those processes? London certainly does not.
Why should London not continue to be exempt from that bureaucracy and why, having led the way for many years on a system which, as I said, has been recognised and well trialled, has it been scooped up into this scheme at all? It has been deliberately included: there is no question that this was a mistake. It has deliberately been included because of those two specific aspects of Clause 44(6) on page 37 and Schedule 12. That schedule runs to four pages of legislation as well, because it replicates everything that is on the four pages that we have before us.
Will the Minister, before Third Reading, sit down with us, or with London Councils, and with other Ministers, to see whether we cannot get this system changed, so that London is able to carry on doing what it is doing? It will not be doing anything that is not part of the national decriminalising system, because it has been doing that already. It would just like to carry on issuing penalty charge notices in a way that is simple to understand and that everybody can go along with. It really is an enormous mistake to try to bring London in; it is wholly unnecessary.
If the rest of the country wants to or has to conform to the legislation, so be it. In many, many occasions, under the London Local Authorities Act, London
differs from other parts of the country. That is what that Act is about: to give London the ability to do things that it needs to do on the basis of London’s necessities. I ask the Minister to consider meeting us again to discover whether we cannot, before Third Reading, have London removed from this process. It will not do anything different from the rest of the country: it will be part of it, but it will do it in its own way. I beg to move.